>a collection of followed feeds is presented in a timeline with the possibility to 'comment'
From my point of view, that's the future.
Using mail is dangerous because it is another protocol, and it still requires account management because nobody will post to arbitrary pages with their primary mail address. That said, mail still has the potential to become the standard for social networks.
Why should comments not be immediately visible? People can already write mails to authors. That's not what builds momentum. The interesting part is the interaction of the audience.
We can build social interaction that improves direct human interaction in the same way that cars improve human movement. I wouldn't focus on slowing it down but on speeding up the filtering so that it is easy to find the individually preferred audience among all possible reactions to an url. The difficult part is to maintain group identities and momentum when all comments are dissected and re-aggregated.
It's problematic to manage comments on the server of a blog post. This creates silos and echo chambers because it is difficult to find the comments of a user on other blogs and creators rarely allow their audience to create their own posts. Newspapers with their comment sections already offer that protocol. We have Facebook because newspapers missed out on coming together and offering the missing parts.
What is missing at Linklonk, apart from opening up to ActivityPub, is long-term conversations on posts. On aggregators like HN, there is an audience at the top comments. Hardly anybody writes comments on old posts. To make comments on off-momentum articles worthwhile, it would be necessary to have a notification function that is triggered not only by replies but also by new comments when they pass a threshold.
LinkLonk supports comment notifications for any item that you have subscribed to. You get notified through browser notifications and email. And you can mute/follow individual branches of the comment tree. Details: https://linklonk.com/item/396040801387544576
There is definitely more to improve, but I'd like to see more use of the comments section first to know what needs to be improved next.
As for ActivityPub, I just saw https://go-fed.org/ on HN and it looks like a good fit to add ActivityPub support to LinkLonk (since it is written in Go). There are multiple ways to do it, so let me know how you would like to see it working. Do you want to follow posts of Mastodon users on LinkLonk (similar to how it shows you RSS content)? Do you want Mastodon users to be able to follow your channels on LinkLonk (e.g. @s3000@linklonk.com)?
>LinkLonk supports comment notifications ... can mute/follow individual branches
Great!
>how you would like to see it working
That's a difficult question. My primary focus is on the availability of discussions. Nevertheless, integrating LinkLonk in both directions with Mastodon should help with growth. There doesn't seem to be an algorithmic timeline, which LinkLonk could provide. Establishing LinkLonk as an integrated RSS Reader and ActivityPub Client could attract a bigger user base that makes calculating suggestions easier.
What ActivityPub can bring to new social networks like LinkLonk is the ability to share the comment section with various other providers. E.g. RSS readers or annotating browser plugins can pool their comments in one place to have an active discussion even if each tool has a small user number.
However, pooling discussions is generally avoided:
1. When there is a dupe on HN, the discussion in the old submission is not continued.
2. There exist various aggregators like lobste.rs, reddit.com/programming or tildes.net, that almost discuss the same articles as HN, but they are different communities.
3. Twitter and Mastodon could pool the replies to posts of the same url, but they don't.
The trivial approach for LinkLonk would be an integration with lemmy.ml and all Mastodon posts that discuss the same URL. That way, most posts would come with a discussion and LinkLonk instantly had a vibrant community.
With the pool-avoiding behavior in mind, some adjustments could be needed but I haven't figured out what that could be.
> Why should comments not be immediately visible? People can already write mails to authors. That's not what builds momentum. The interesting part is the interaction of the audience.
I agree, but I was thinking of some filtering function wherein the webmaster can whitelist/blacklist comments. If a certain site or topic attracts - for whatever reason - visitors who abuse the comments, the webmaster needs to be able to block stuff afterwards or even upfront. An ideal life would be wherein every visitor/commenter does only nice things.
> Hardly anybody writes comments on old posts.
Interesting idea. I always like it when I get responses on my videos/comments on Youtube from years ago.
From my point of view, that's the future.
Using mail is dangerous because it is another protocol, and it still requires account management because nobody will post to arbitrary pages with their primary mail address. That said, mail still has the potential to become the standard for social networks.
Why should comments not be immediately visible? People can already write mails to authors. That's not what builds momentum. The interesting part is the interaction of the audience.
We can build social interaction that improves direct human interaction in the same way that cars improve human movement. I wouldn't focus on slowing it down but on speeding up the filtering so that it is easy to find the individually preferred audience among all possible reactions to an url. The difficult part is to maintain group identities and momentum when all comments are dissected and re-aggregated.
It's problematic to manage comments on the server of a blog post. This creates silos and echo chambers because it is difficult to find the comments of a user on other blogs and creators rarely allow their audience to create their own posts. Newspapers with their comment sections already offer that protocol. We have Facebook because newspapers missed out on coming together and offering the missing parts.
What is missing at Linklonk, apart from opening up to ActivityPub, is long-term conversations on posts. On aggregators like HN, there is an audience at the top comments. Hardly anybody writes comments on old posts. To make comments on off-momentum articles worthwhile, it would be necessary to have a notification function that is triggered not only by replies but also by new comments when they pass a threshold.